tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83623549343966148032024-03-13T03:38:07.505-07:00Pain in the techWondering why technology needs to be so painful.Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06455752000373769998noreply@blogger.comBlogger16125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8362354934396614803.post-36738541098817548602021-02-01T00:46:00.000-08:002021-02-01T00:46:03.021-08:00Creating a time-accurate mp4 video out of a collection of photos<p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Way back when I got married, I asked the attendees to send me their digital photos so I could get various angles of the event. I got back photos from about 10 different cameras, plus two digital videos.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Using Picasa, it was easy to view all this content in one album, but the first problem was time stamps (these photos were all digital camera photos, with manually-set clocks). In Picasa, using one reference camera (my own), I then shifted each camera's photos times until it matched mine. I could now view the photos on my computer in sequence, as long as it was in Picasa.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">My photos sat this in state for over 10 years. Recently, I got the urge to work on my wedding video, but the two non-HD video streams look quite dated. Wouldn't it be nice to insert higher resolution photos into the wedding video at key moments. But with over 500 photos, it would not be practical to manually place them at the right timestamp my video editing software.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">My solution was to turn these photos into a video, with each photo displayed at the right timestamp relative to the very first photo in the stream. From searching around, I couldn't find anyone who had actually done this, hence this article.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #282828; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px 0px 10px;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">I used the exiftool/ffmpeg tools, free to use on multiple OS platforms, but the syntax below is for Windows.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #282828; font-family: Roboto, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px 0px 10px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700;">What you need</span>:</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #282828; font-family: Roboto, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px 0px 10px;">Download exiftool and ffmpeg (I won't post a link - they're both popular tools easily findable by the great Google)</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #282828; font-family: Roboto, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px 0px 10px;">Make sure you can download this Excel spreadsheet. You'll need to edit it on your own Excel-capable machine (or upload it to GoogleDocs to perform further editing)</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #282828; font-family: Roboto, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px 0px 10px;"><a href="https://1drv.ms/x/s!AgFCNBReexfMnnn_cN0OlyR1yYaK?e=1JvgYJ">https://1drv.ms/x/s!AgFCNBReexfMnnn_cN0OlyR1yYaK?e=1JvgYJ</a></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #282828; font-family: Roboto, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px 0px 10px;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700;">Instructions</span>:</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #282828; font-family: Roboto, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px 0px 10px;">From a command prompt, navigate to where your jpg files are stored. Then run:</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #282828; font-family: Roboto, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px 0px 10px;">"<path to>\exiftool.exe" *.jpg -s -DateTimeOriginal -csv > photos.csv</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #282828; font-family: Roboto, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px 0px 10px;">(note - It's possible that the Exif field your camera/photo program uses might populate/prefer a different field from DateTimeOriginal, so change that as appropriate)<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />Open photos.csv in excel (or whatever program you have for .csv), then copy/paste the two columns into the first two columns of the ToFFMPEG.xlsx file I shared above. All the other columns in ToFFMPEG.xlsx past Column C are calculations - don't modify those. If the number of files you're pasting in exceeds the number of pre-populated formulas in Column C and beyond, just Fill Down those formula rows as well.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #282828; font-family: Roboto, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px 0px 10px;">Important - sort by Column B, so that the durations will calculate correctly.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #282828; font-family: Roboto, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px 0px 10px;">Note - the last row in the file will not be able to calculate a duration, so it will just take the duration from cell K2.<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />The calculations are in Columns D, E, F, and the final results are put in Column C. Copy that column C into your favourite txt editor. You'll see double quotation marks everywhere that weren't in Excel, but are an artifact of copy/paste when there are multiple lines per cell. Delete all of these double quotation marks with a search/replace. Save it as ToFFMpeg.txt . This is the input into FFMPEG.<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" /><br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />Then, run the following ffmpeg command:<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" /><br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />"<path to>\ffmpeg" -f concat -safe 0 -i ToFFMpeg.txt -vf "scale=1920:1080:force_original_aspect_ratio=decrease,pad=1920:1080:(ow-iw)/2:(oh-ih)/2,setsar=1" -pix_fmt yuv420p -c:v libx264 output.mp4</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #282828; font-family: Roboto, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px 0px 10px;">(the above command should be run on a single line, despite how this forum is splitting it across multiple lines)<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />This will create your mp4 file. Change the 1920:1080 resolution to whatever you need to optimize with your output video.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #282828; font-family: Roboto, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px 0px 10px;">Limitations: exif data has only per-second granularity. If two photos are taken at the same second, one will have a duration of 0 seconds, and will probably be hidden by the second photo in your output video.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #282828; font-family: Roboto, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px 0px 10px;">Apparently, ffmpeg has the ability to read and output exif data itself, but as I was already familiar with exiftool, that's what I used.</p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #282828; font-family: Roboto, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px 0px 10px;">Here's a screenshot of the photo mp4 stream embedded with two video camera shots in my Movie Studio project:</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-_VgCwqQIQjA/YBe-stvhBZI/AAAAAAABJcM/zgMdeha0bDsO-_pm7T5BiGGpeInZjQiVACLcBGAsYHQ/s1627/ffmpegVideoScreenshot.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="713" data-original-width="1627" height="280" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-_VgCwqQIQjA/YBe-stvhBZI/AAAAAAABJcM/zgMdeha0bDsO-_pm7T5BiGGpeInZjQiVACLcBGAsYHQ/w640-h280/ffmpegVideoScreenshot.png" width="640" /></a></div><br /><p></p>Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06455752000373769998noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8362354934396614803.post-48342219241759665992016-01-23T23:20:00.001-08:002019-11-05T23:06:19.689-08:00170 Floppies for sale! *sold**sold*<br />
<br />
Gather round, kids, for you are about to hear a tale of patience, and the acceptance of failure.<br />
<br />
Once upon a time, hard drives were expensive. Like, $300 for a 40 megabyte drive expensive. But a much cheaper alternative existed, in the form of a black round disc. Problem with this disc is that it was very sensitive to dirt and fingerprints, so it was enclosed inside a 5.25-inch plastic square, and it was called a floppy disc. It could even be made double sided, so that reading the entire contents of a disc meant you had to flip it over. In its heyday, it would store 1.2 megabytes, which by today's standards, might store about a minute-long mp3. But back in those days, where a program's size was measured in kilobytes, that size was plenty. You kids might have seen this disc, in the form of a Save icon. Well, take a gander at one of the photographs in this ad, because there it is!<br />
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-MWkS77domFc/VqR6tMjSzlI/AAAAAAAAS4E/57rgsjZLEgk/s1600/IMG_4773.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-MWkS77domFc/VqR6tMjSzlI/AAAAAAAAS4E/57rgsjZLEgk/s400/IMG_4773.JPG" width="400" /></a><br />
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Floppies got smaller and more durable. In a 3.5-inch format, they'd store 1.44 megabytes. Sold for as cheap as a dollar a disc retail, they became the most common format for distributing software in a pre-internet era - just package up a floppy of hardware drivers with a network card, and the user would be able to use it right away ("right away" meaning after manually experimenting with IRQ's). A company called AOL sent out millions of 3.5-inch floppies in the mail with free trials of its online service to become one of the largest dial-up internet providers in the world.<br />
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Floppies, however, were manufactured of varying quality, and susceptible to enviromental factors. Bad sectors would creep up on the cheaper discs over time, irrecoverably trashing the data on the disc. They were common vectors for viruses which would copy themselves onto the boot sector of the disc, where most computers were programmed to boot from upon bootup, silently infecting the hard disc. Ambient magnetism could undetectably corrupt data.<br />
<br />
Support for USB drives in Windows 95 (and an even better implementation in Windows 98) eliminated the need for a floppy drive, though it would take a few years more before BIOS manufacturers came up with reliable solutions for flashing BIOSes from something other than a floppy. Apple was the first major computer manufacturer to push the floppy drive out of public usage by not including one in 1998 with their iMac.<br />
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Since then, floppies have disappeared the way rotary phones, LP records, and cassette tapes have, replaced by much better technology. And like many of those unused kin, their imagery exists solely as an icon to the tool.<br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-UUdaaP1OMo0/VqR6G36iAQI/AAAAAAAAS3s/G-DxmE08zh0/s1600/IMG_4769.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-UUdaaP1OMo0/VqR6G36iAQI/AAAAAAAAS3s/G-DxmE08zh0/s320/IMG_4769.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
In a retro kind-of-way, the 170 3.5 inch floppies (and the dozen or so 5.25 inch floppies) might be useful to someone. Maybe you want to stick them on your wall, and spell out your name in pixels. Maybe you want to attach a few to your fridge with magnets, as a conversation piece. Maybe you're building a custom water feature that testifies how the disposal culture of technology is eroding our planet's resources. There are some AOL discs in here too (though they've been erased) that you might want to mail your friends as a joke.<br />
<br />
Or maybe you really want to use these to store data. In which case you're in luck - I've erased/formatted every one of these discs (with the exception of some write-protected driver discs - I leave them as a bookmark into the era that created them) so they're ready for you as a receptacle to your (hopefully replicated elsewhere) data.<br />
<br />
What's that? You don't have a floppy drive? Well now, here's a bonus for you - act now, and I'll include an internal 3.5" floppy drive and cable! I know it works because it's the one I used to read/format these discs. You will need to make sure your computer has a floppy connector (my 5 year old computer still does).<br />
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-z_J98OjD2lc/VqR6wy9E1SI/AAAAAAAAS4M/24XFnKDolNE/s1600/IMG_4776.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-z_J98OjD2lc/VqR6wy9E1SI/AAAAAAAAS4M/24XFnKDolNE/s320/IMG_4776.JPG" width="320" /></a><br />
Also included are a few disc carrying cases, as well as a foam shark carrying case!<br />
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-AZF_JDkQkrA/VqR6YGnvPEI/AAAAAAAAS30/WT7NmWIK5YM/s1600/IMG_4770.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-AZF_JDkQkrA/VqR6YGnvPEI/AAAAAAAAS30/WT7NmWIK5YM/s320/IMG_4770.JPG" width="320" /></a><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-LLFD8IhJjIw/VqR6YyhKxqI/AAAAAAAAS38/GTFddk25I2s/s1600/IMG_4772.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-LLFD8IhJjIw/VqR6YyhKxqI/AAAAAAAAS38/GTFddk25I2s/s320/IMG_4772.JPG" width="320" /></a><br />
Asking $20, because the foam shark is so cute! But feel free to shoot me an offer, or send a sob story of how the floppies remind you of an long-ago-but-not-forgotten error-prone relationship, and how they have inspired you to "chkdsk /f" that relationship so that you can "xcopy a:*.* c: /s" right away and salvage what's left.Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06455752000373769998noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8362354934396614803.post-5045530649673035442013-02-12T23:45:00.001-08:002013-02-13T00:22:10.514-08:00Orzeszek Ratings bidirectional syncSee <a href="http://techpains.blogspot.com/2013/02/syncing-ratings-and-play-counts-between.html" target="">here for a background</a> of the problem I was trying to solve.<br />
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<a href="http://www.orzeszek.org/dev/ratings/" target="_blank">Orzeszek Ratings</a> is the only tool out there to move your ratings and play counts between iTunes and Windows Media Player (on the same Windows OS computer). I did encounter a limitation, which was that if a song was played in iTunes, and a different song was played in WMP, Orzeszek Ratings would only permit you to sync in one direction, meaning that metadata would be lost in the opposite direction. I made a few changes to facilitate a two way sync, and the logic is the following:<br />
Version 1.3 beta (can be<a href="http://www.orzeszek.org/files/orzeszek-ratings-1.3-beta.zip"> downloaded from here</a>) will <b>inspect </b>each song one by one, <b>determining which metadata is the authoritative source </b>by looking at which has the higher play count, and will <b>sync play count</b>, the <b>rating</b>, and the <b>last played date</b> (if applicable) to the non-authoritative source. <b>IMPORTANT</b>: bidirectional sync will probably not work for you if you've been rating music on one player, but listening to it on another. Do a unidirectional sync first to bring your ratings over to the other player.<br />
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Instructions on use:<br />
Start up Ratings. Select Bidirectional. Click Sync. Click Open Log at any time during operation to see what has been synced.<br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Nm7ZDPi0Wus/URtFuZnRMRI/AAAAAAAAGiI/8RLm6L7QpH4/s1600/ORatings.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Nm7ZDPi0Wus/URtFuZnRMRI/AAAAAAAAGiI/8RLm6L7QpH4/s1600/ORatings.png" /></a></div>
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<br />
Here's the change list from version 1.2<br />
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<ul>
<li>bidirectional sync (all Settings are disabled, as BiDirectional needs control over all of them)</li>
<li>New setting: "Only sync ratings if playcount is higher". When used with a uni-directional sync (it is automatically on for bidirectional), it prevents a less-played song on one player from clobbering the rating of a more-played song in the other player.</li>
<li>Ability to sync Last Played Date, but only from WMP to iTunes, as it's a read-only field in WMP</li>
<li>New setting: "Only sync LastPlayedDate" if more recent. Prevents WMP from clobbering the iTunes Last Played Date if the iTunes is more recent.</li>
<li>logging in a text file to record what exactly is synced</li>
</ul>
<div>
Limitations:</div>
<div>
<ul>
<li>If a song has been played in both iTunes and WMP such that the play count has been incremented exactly the same, no sync will happen, even if the ratings are different. My workflow is to sync often enough that I'd be unlikely to listen to the same song in different applications</li>
<li>Bidirectional Sync will set the playcount to be the same between the two players as it uses that to determine the direction of future syncs. Note that the first sync will simply take the greater of the two, which is not the same as the sum of the two. If the sum is important to you, use one of the unidirectional options with "Aggregate and move play counts" first. After a bidirectional sync, the playcount in both players will then represent the total playcount of the song.</li>
</ul>
</div>
<div>
The sync does not touch your files - it only manipulates the respective Music Management System databases, but there is always a risk that it could corrupt what's already there (especially if the process is interrupted somehow by something like your OS crashing). I strongly recommend you back up the MMS databases prior to your initial sync. Of course, once your sync has happened, one MMS will effectively be a backup of the other. All the standard disclaimers apply, and specifically I make no guarantees on the safety of this tool on your system. I've only tested it on a single machine -- mine -- and there is always a chance that you may have that one machine where it fails. That said, I've been running the sync weekly for the last months, and it's been stable for me. The <a href="http://www.orzeszek.org/files/orzeszek-ratings-1.3-beta-source.zip">source code</a> is available in case you wish to scrutinize it.</div>
<div>
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If you have any feedback on this version, post it in the comments below.</div>
Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06455752000373769998noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8362354934396614803.post-22237045519915805222013-02-12T23:44:00.002-08:002013-02-13T00:06:27.240-08:00Syncing ratings and play counts between iTunes and Windows Media PlayerI have a huge music collection, mostly because I have very diverse musical tastes. I will give every genre of music a chance. Organizing it, however, is a bit of a pain. One day, I will tag my mp3s and make sure their album art is correct. With a 11,000 song collection, that day will probably never come. I needed a way to sort out what is actually worth tagging, and rating the music is the best way. So I began, about 4 years ago, to listen to every song I have and rating it. I spend very little time on my computer actually listening to music, and the only portable device I had capable of rating the music was a Dell Axim X51v PDA, running Windows Mobile OS. I'd sync a gig of music onto the device, then listen to the music while commuting to work, giving star ratings to each song. When that playlist became fully rated, I'd sync a new, unrated set of music.<br />
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11,000 songs will still amount to over 700 hours of music, so I'd take some shortcuts...such as allowing myself to tap Next after half the song was over (usually a 1 star).<br />
<br />
Anyways, many hours later, my collection is finally fully rated. I knew leading up to this that I was going to face one critical problem - my music was only rated in Windows Media Player, but my Android device had no way of syncing ratings to it. I certainly wasn't going to lug around two devices just to listen to music, so I needed a way to get my ratings over from WMP over to iTunes so I can use the iSyncr app to sync to Android.<br />
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After much searching for a solution, I came across <a href="http://www.orzeszek.org/dev/ratings/" target="_blank">Orzeszek Ratings</a>, which promises to get ratings from one platform to another. Hooray! It worked wonderfully, and now I had ratings in both music management systems. However, I now had a different problem - I still use WMP as my player of choice at home for its ability to share the library with other DLNA devices. I might update ratings in iTunes with iSyncr, so I also needed to be able to sync back to WMP, but if I had updated some ratings in WMP (for different songs), the one-way sync of Orzeszek Ratings would overwrite them with the iTunes ratings. Fortunately, the developer of Orzeszek Ratings has made his software open sourced, meaning I've been able to crack it open and put in a two-way sync feature, which I've been using a few months. Details are <a href="http://techpains.blogspot.ca/2013/02/orzeszek-ratings-two-way-sync.html">here</a>.Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06455752000373769998noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8362354934396614803.post-10979241710973594832011-11-21T22:00:00.001-08:002011-11-21T22:33:36.642-08:00Windows XP is not deadWhile you can't buy a Windows XP PC anymore, the 9-year old operating system is far from dead. Microsoft still supports it, as far as keeping the Windows Update site running. Also, on non-hyperthreaded/single CPU systems, it is probably the fastest OS. However, that could still be quite slow, if your PC is exactly as it was when you bought it (256mb ram, 20gb hard drive). When you first brought that computer home, it probably would've been quite snappy, but 9 years of Windows Updates and memory-hungry browsers have also bogged down the OS. With all the latest updates, you'll need more hardware.<br />
I had enough parts to rebuild a PC for a friend, and put XP Pro on it. The original hardware was an Athlon 1600+ (1.4ghz), 512mb ram, 20gb 5200 rpm hard drive. It worked, but after any kind of extended use, it started madly thrashing to disk. I decided to put in a few upgrades to see what kind of impact it would have.<br />
Original:<br />
Startup time (from Windows logo until the red shield appeared to indicate a lack of antivirus): 1:03 minute<br />
IE startup: 22 seconds<br />
Chrome startup: 42 seconds<br />
Power off: 43 seconds<br />
<br />
Let's bump that up to 1gb of ram to reduce the thrashing:<br />
Startup time: 47 seconds<br />
IE startup: 37 seconds<br />
Chrome: 31 seconds<br />
Power off: 19 seconds<br />
<br />
Ok, that's better, but let's substitute for a 7200rpm 40gb drive:<br />
Startup: 36 s<br />
IE: 33 s<br />
chrome: 8.8 s<br />
Power Off: 12 s<br />
<br />
So, if you (or possibly your parents) are running XP on anything less than 512 mb of ram on a 5400 rpm drive, you could more than double the performance of the computer just by throwing more ram and upgrading the hard drive. Of course, sourcing the parts may be a problem (stores stopped carrying IDE drives about 4 years ago), but if you have another dead PC somewhere, you may be able to combine the parts to make something usuable, for free.Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06455752000373769998noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8362354934396614803.post-49689004338413224552011-10-29T21:57:00.000-07:002011-10-29T21:57:25.299-07:00PCI TV tuner card reviewTV tuner cards<br />
My father requested me to digitally record a tv show for him recently. I don't have a PVR, so my only option was to use an analog TV tuner card on the analog RCA-outs of the digital Telus Optik tuner box.<br />
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I used an ATI TV Wonder PCI card extensively about five to fifteen years ago, and it worked well. However, my brother left me two other tuner cards, both newer than my ATI card. I did try them in the past, but had the bare cards only, without any drivers or identification on the cards themselves (other than the chipset). I had no success in getting them to work.<br />
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Over the years, I eventually found the boxing and drivers, but didn't have a chance to try it out till now. Here are my findings (which won't be too useful to anybody out there now, unless someone is trying to get old hardware to work)<br />
<b>ATI TV Wonder PCI</b><br />
Manufactured: 1999<br />
Software: MMC, version 7.9 (newer versions would not properly redraw the video overlay if, for instance, the window were resized). Also, there'd be odd problems with the record button not showing up. 7.9 is the newest stable version I could get to work. Features like video-shifting, while present, do not work or could cause the computer to crash.<br />
Driver: tvw-pci-ve-driver-1-11-0-0.exe<br />
Scheduling: Scheduling programs to either watch or record has always been reliable.<br />
Recording options: Once recording, can set a time or duration when it will stop<br />
<br />
<b>3DeMON PV951T</b><br />
Manufactured: 2000<br />
Software: a barebones tv watching and recording software. No keyboard support.<br />
Driver: On the driver CD are Win2k drivers, which will work with XP. Caveats: it will greedily use the ATI drivers, which will only provide composite (RCA) and svideo inputs; the tuner itself will be unavailable. I was using a Windows XP box that I'm going to reghost after this testing, so I made frequent use of System Restore to roll back the system state to prior my ATI driver installations. Only then could I point the driver search to the CD.<br />
I searched all around the internet for actual working drivers. It uses a bt878 chipset, which is also what ATI uses, but the generic bt878 drivers I found online don't seem to do the job.<br />
Even after I got the device manager to stop showing yellow exclamation marks, however, I still couldn't get any audio out of this card. Most PCI tv cards don't provide audio directly to the system; rather, they pass it to the sound card. With the ATI card, audio passed in through the CD input to the system. With this card, there's no internal connector, so one must use a 3.5" audio cable to connect the audio-out jack to the line-in jack of the video card. A bit clumsy, and in this case, not working at all. There was simply no audio-out, regardless of the drivers I used, regardless of whether I used the 3DeMON TV software or the ATI software (which worked as well since the chipset is similar).<br />
Scheduling: none<br />
Recording options: the TV viewing software sucked so much I didn't bother trying to record.<br />
<br />
<b>Leadtek WinFast 2000</b><br />
Manufactured: 2003<br />
Software: probably the best looking software. The best feature was the ability to record in whatever aspect ratio was specified. For instance, if 16:9 was specified, the resulting video would appear in 16:9 (as viewed in VLC). ATI's would insist on recording the video letterboxed. The software seems generic enough to work with the ATI hardware.<br />
Driver: I found this on the internet years ago. XPWHQL.zip I don't know where you'd find it now.<br />
Recording options: When recording, also has ability to specify how much longer to record for, and whether to shut down the computer when down recording. The other big plus is time-shifting, which allows you to pause the live program you might be watching, and return to it later (and skip commercials)<br />
<br />
The one caveat when recording from the Optik box (from any of these inputs) is that Optik will reset the aspect ratio to 4:3 when it detects an HDMI connection (which happens when you switch your TV to the HDMI input). This isn't terrible - it's just that the picture quality would be squished in sending to the TV card. One needs to navigate the Optik menus to switch back to 16:9 aspect ratio.Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06455752000373769998noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8362354934396614803.post-73951908559123399002011-10-29T21:49:00.000-07:002011-10-29T21:49:27.598-07:00Phantom power - should we care?I wanted measure the relative electricity consumption of various devices around the home, especially with regards to the so-called phantom power. Phantom power is a power draw used by devices that are plugged in, even when they are not actively turned on (like televisions, VCRs which do nothing except for display the time, and computers). You've probably heard the occasional reminder from your power company about the significance of phantom power. I've wondered just how significant this is to our power usage, so I bought a power metering device from Zellers. It provides the real-time power usage of any device plugged in. Here's some data:<br />
Compact fluorescent lamp: 19w<br />
My Windows Mobile PDA on, and charging: 12w<br />
Same, only charging and not on: 1w<br />
24" LCD monitor, on: 22w<br />
same monitor, off: 0w<br />
<br />
Yamaha 67 key musical keyboard (on): 7w<br />
Same, off: 3w<br />
PC: 9w when off, 112w when on<br />
laptop (on): 53w<br />
<br />
Phone charger (microUSB), nothing plugged in: 0w<br />
<br />
Phone charger (microUSB), phone plugged in: 3w<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
The phantom power of a bunch of devices plugged into my computer power bar 17w</div>
<div>
Phantom power of a bunch of devices plugged into my media centre: 22w</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<br />
BC Hydro charges our home a basic fee, and a variable fee. The variable is $0.0667 per kWh. A kWh is the amount of energy used by 1000W for one hour, or 100W for 10 hours.<br />
<br />
As far as phantom power on all my devices goes, that's about 40w * 720h = 28.8 kwh , or less than $2, which is basically not all that significant, costwise.<br />
<br />
<br />
D complains whenever I need to leave the computer on overnight, so I calculated that for 8 hours:<br />
112/1000 * 8 * 0.0667 = $0.06. For those who leave your computers on 24/7 for the the entire month, this is $5.38.<br />
<br />
<br />
Where is most of our power going then? <br />
lighting - incandescent bulbs are notoriously inefficient<br />
cooking - there's a reason they're plugged into 240v outlets<br />
<br />
We don't use the drier, and seldom use the dishwasher, so none of our power is going there.<br />
<br />
As an experiment this month, we've refrained from switching on our home heating (forced air) and will only use electrical heating (portable space heaters) for our home. When our next bill comes, we will compare it with the same period last year where we used our home's gas heating (which doesn't work very efficiently anyways in our home) and will compare costs. I suspect the cost difference will be less than $10 since our regular variable rate for gas is also quite low. If so, the savings won't be worth the inconvenience of lugging our space heaters around and the temporary pain with leaving our localized warming areas.<br />
<br />
**all costs are minus HST**Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06455752000373769998noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8362354934396614803.post-47849772492554586592011-10-07T20:55:00.000-07:002011-10-07T20:55:02.877-07:00Hard drive reliabilityThe problem with modern day reliability tests of hard drives is that it is difficult to test how time affects drives. Running a drive for five years is not the same as reading and writing terabytes of data to a drive for a month. Voltage spikes on booting up a computer and vibrations from removing a drive from a case can't be mimicked in a lab.<br />
<br />
Brand reputation doesn't mean a whole lot either. No brand that I've owned has been immune to the click of death or the high pitched wheeze that accompanies a dying or dead drive.<br />
<br />
I've gone through lots of hard drives in my time. Thankfully, most have died after being decommissioned, or I was able to recover the data from them before putting them out to pasture. As a service to someone out there (and for my own record), here are the hard drives that have died on me.<br />
<br />
Western Digital 2.1 gb. This is the first ever drive that died on me. The motor spinning it just got weak, and I'd have to give it a quick twirl in my wrist to get it in motion. Once in motion, it was fine for a short while. Eventually, I got write errors, so I put this drive out to pasture. I was glad for the excuse--it was by far the loudest drive I've ever owned.<br />
<br />
Samsung 20g (SV2002H). I've always liked Samsung as the maker of the quietest drives. Unfortunately, they do have a reputation as unreliable drives. I'm 1 for 2 as far as reliability is concerned for this brand.<br />
<br />
IBM Deskstar (IC35L040AVER07). I chose this one mainly for the performance reports from some online source. They were commonly referred to in the hardware community as Deathstars. This is the only IBM drive I've ever owned.<br />
<br />
Western Digital (WD1200). I didn't buy this drive; it was part of a RAID config when it failed, so no big loss.<br />
<br />
Quite a few Maxtor drives have passed through my possession, but surprisingly none have died.<br />
<br />
The moral of the story is that all drives will die. Even you fans of Solid State Drive might one day be disappointed that your drive is dying (though I'd expect them to be more reliable). Run a back up system. For a while, I was running a file mirroring software over network shares, but that required me to be diligent about running it. Currently, I use a software package that backs up the folders on your computer to another computer on the network, which takes care of the two most likely reasons to need a backup - drive failure, and theft.Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06455752000373769998noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8362354934396614803.post-63280581478035943762011-04-20T23:29:00.000-07:002011-04-20T23:29:59.348-07:00Switching inputs on HDTV to PC not picking up signalI'm now using my Optiplex 620 as my media PC rather than D's PC for a few reasons:<br />
- it doesn't supply any USB power when turned off, so our USB printer (Epson Stylus 520) goes nuts for about 30 seconds with a cleaning cycle when the PC is shut down<br />
- The Windows install that I thought was fixed was still really wonky after that repair I talked about in the prior post: the NetGear drivers would crash every once in a while, a particular Windows Update simply wouldn't work, and I fudged up some of the NTFS permissions on some key folders preventing the Windows Firewall Service from starting up correctly<br />
<br />
Because of this, the Optiplex is now on our LCD TV (Samsung). I soon realized that there was a problem of sorts. When I switched inputs to the TV from the PC HDMI to anything else and back, the signal would not return to the TV. I had to unplug the cable, and replug. I figured it might be a driver problem, so I switched from Dell's driver to ATI's driver for the video card, a Radeon X600. No cigar.<br />
<br />
Then I started reading about similar stories for which the out-of-reach fix would be a mythical ATI Catalyst driver that would solve the problems.<br />
<br />
The source of the problem is that some video cards (or their drivers) will stop sending a signal when the output is lost connection (in the case of the LCD TV, that happens when you switch modes and it is no longer "listening" on the HDMI PC connection). When you switch back to that mode, the TV starts listening, but the video card does not resume sending the signal. When you unplug and plug the cable, a HDMI handshaking happens communicating the output parameters, fixing the problem<br />
<br />
Unplugging the cable is not a viable permanent solution.<br />
<br />
I eventually found this tool, which effectively resets the display to force a handshake:<br />
<a href="http://thydzik.com/hdmion-a-solution-to-loss-of-dvi-video-epid-signal-on-hd-tvs/">http://thydzik.com/hdmion-a-solution-to-loss-of-dvi-video-epid-signal-on-hd-tvs/</a><br />
<br />
I assigned it to a hotkey on my keyboard, so I can now manually reset the display. Not quite as good as automatically, but <a href="http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=17448181#post17448181">until I upgrade my TVPC to Win7</a>, this will have to do.Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06455752000373769998noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8362354934396614803.post-81455880498129158322011-03-24T01:09:00.000-07:002011-03-24T01:09:46.637-07:00Able to browse to shares, unable to enumerate them<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #273d49; font-family: arial; font-size: 13px;">I've struggled with this problem on one of my WINXP Home boxes for years, and have simply resigned myself to jumping directly to the \\machinename\share rather than being able to conveniently browsing it from \\machinename. Finally, tonight, I figured it out (with the help of </span><a href="http://www.pcreview.co.uk/forums/workgroup-issue-can-see-shares-but-can-t-browse-computer-t1902202.html">http://www.pcreview.co.uk/forums/workgroup-issue-can-see-shares-but-can-t-browse-computer-t1902202.html</a>)<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #273d49; font-family: arial; font-size: 13px;">:</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #273d49; font-family: arial; font-size: 13px;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #273d49; font-family: arial; font-size: 13px;">start | Run | type 'Regedit' in the box.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #273d49; font-family: arial; font-size: 13px;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #273d49; font-family: arial; font-size: 13px;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #273d49; font-family: arial; font-size: 13px;">On the left hand pane, navigate to:</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #273d49; font-family: arial; font-size: 13px;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #273d49; font-family: arial; font-size: 13px;">HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\LSA\</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #273d49; font-family: arial; font-size: 13px;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #273d49; font-family: arial; font-size: 13px;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #273d49; font-family: arial; font-size: 13px;">In the LSA folder, look in the right-hand pane.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #273d49; font-family: arial; font-size: 13px;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #273d49; font-family: arial; font-size: 13px;">look for the value 'RestrictAnonymous'.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #273d49; font-family: arial; font-size: 13px;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #273d49; font-family: arial; font-size: 13px;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #273d49; font-family: arial; font-size: 13px;">It needs to be zero.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #273d49; font-family: arial; font-size: 13px;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #273d49; font-family: arial; font-size: 13px;">If it is not, double-click it and set it to zero.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #273d49; font-family: arial; font-size: 13px;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #273d49; font-family: arial; font-size: 13px;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #273d49; font-family: arial; font-size: 13px;">( The value of RestrictAnonymousSam can be left at 1. )</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #273d49; font-family: arial; font-size: 13px;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #273d49; font-family: arial; font-size: 13px;"><br />
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #273d49; font-family: arial; font-size: 13px;">Close regedit, and re-boot the server machine.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #273d49; font-family: arial; font-size: 13px;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #273d49; font-family: arial; font-size: 13px;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #273d49; font-family: arial; font-size: 13px;"><br />
</span>Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06455752000373769998noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8362354934396614803.post-77640774769071888492011-03-04T12:55:00.000-08:002011-03-04T13:15:43.590-08:00Migration of XP in IDE drive to SATA in a Dell OptiplexMoving one XP installation to another drive typically will take several days. Basically, it is<br />
<br />
<ol><li>prepping your old drive</li>
<li>imaging your old drive to the other drive</li>
<li>booting up the other drive</li>
<li>fixing all the problems that come up.</li>
</ol>With that in mind, I still thought it would be better to migrate my wife's WinXP home installation to the Optiplex than installing Windows from scratch (which, if I did, would be with Win7) which would require me to source the various software packages that she uses.<br />
<br />
This took about 3 days, but it's finally (mostly) working. Here it is in detail. Read through it before following the steps, as not all steps are necessary, or you may be able to adjust the steps more efficiently.<br />
<br />
<ol><li>Backup your essential info on your IDE drive with your old pc</li>
<li><a href="http://support.dell.com/support/downloads/driverslist.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=gen&os=WW1&osl=en&catid=&impid=&SystemID=PLX_GX620">Download </a>the optiplex network, chipset and display drivers and save it - this will save you time later when you need these drivers but have no network connection with which to get them</li>
<li>Prior to the last time you shut down the source install of Windows, go into the Device Manager and remove the IDE controller. This step was required for switching to a different IDE controller (or else your machine wouldn't be able to boot past the low-res Windows logo), but I'm not sure if this is necessary anymore since we're moving to SATA. It doesn't hurt though, since Windows will auto-install the controller on bootup.</li>
<li>Create a UBCD4WIN bootable CD</li>
<li>Move your IDE drive into the Optiplex (which already has a SATA drive)</li>
<li>Ensure that your IDE drive is accessible by pressing F2 at bootup to enter the BIOS setup and making sure the PATA connections are set to ON. Also make sure you can boot to the CD while you're here.</li>
<li>After booting up UBCD4WIN, use a tool to create partitions that will at least hold the data of your old drive. I just used the Disk Management tool that comes with Windows (r-click on Windows Explorer and choose Manage).</li>
<li>Run DriveBackupXML to copy your IDE partitions to the SATA partitions. In my case, my IDE drive was drive 0, and SATA was drive 1, but DriveBackupXML will at least show drive labels to help you confirm this.</li>
<li>Go back into the Disk Management Tool of step 6 to set the main partition as Active.</li>
<li>Shut down your computer, and disconnect your IDE drive.</li>
<li>Boot up, making sure that your are booting up to your SATA drive and not your cdrom drive (in case your UBCD4WIN is still in the drive)</li>
<li>See how far Windows gets in its bootup. (once Windows can boot up, you can put your old IDE drive back into your old machine, in case you still need it to access the internet and look up problems)</li>
<li>If you are able to see the mouse cursor, then you know that the drive is accessible through Windows. If not, boot back into UBCD4WIN and run FIX_HDC. Then try booting back into Windows.</li>
<li>In my case, it seemed everything was working except for mouse and keyboard. Normally, those would autodetect properly. However, the network drivers weren't installed for the onboard ethernet, and its Yes/No dialog prevented any further drivers from being installed. There is no way to install drivers from within a UBCD4WIN environment, nor is there a way to do it from the Recovery Console. My only recourse was to do a repair, also known as an in-place upgrade: <a href="http://support.microsoft.com/kb/978788">http://support.microsoft.com/kb/978788</a> . Note that you'll need your original XP install CD to do this. I had made an XP SP3 slipstreamed CD a few yrs back, so this did the trick...sorta.</li>
<li>While I was now able to use the mouse and keyboard, there were a few new problems:</li>
<ol><li>the Network Connections showing up no connections despite the network adapter drivers having been installed correctly (as reported in Device Manager). I followed all the steps here, to no avail: <a href="http://support.microsoft.com/kb/825826">http://support.microsoft.com/kb/825826</a></li>
<li>The second issue was that ATI Control Centre (which I no longer needed in the optiplex) which ran on startup was complaining that it didn't have security settings to change anything. "You Do Not Have Permission to Change The Catalyst Control Centre Settings"</li>
<li>The third issue was that running any sort of installer (such as the drivers) would display an error that Windows Installer wasn't working.</li>
</ol><li>My SP3 slipstream cd has always given me some amount of trouble, so I thought I'd try my RTM copy of WinXP for the repair. After repairing for an hour, the results were even worse, as upon bootup, the mouse cursor would appear momentarily, a messagebox would appear for a brief instant, then the machine would immediately reboot. After trying this several times, I finally got a glimpse of the error - something about the virtual memory. Having never seen that before, and also not too excited to debug a problem for which there isn't a clear error message, I returned back to the SP3 slipstream repair.</li>
<li>I tried addressing each problem in #15 individually, but no solution seemed to work. Eventually, I took a look in the event viewer and looked up an error message, which pointed me to this: <a href="http://support.microsoft.com/kb/909444">http://support.microsoft.com/kb/909444</a> and <a href="http://support.microsoft.com/kb/916254">http://support.microsoft.com/kb/916254</a>. Bingo! A single problem which describes all the symptoms I was seeing. To change security permissions on XP home folders, you need to boot into Safe Mode, then turn off Simple File Sharing. I didn't end up acting on the second KB article, but include it for reference.</li>
<li>I rebooted into normal mode, and finally, all of those symptoms disappeared, revealing new problems. Since the repair moved my IE back about 8 years to IE6, a lot of dependent services were failing. I downloaded and installed IE8.</li>
<li>My wireless network adapter would occasionally crash. I figured that my base install sans Windows Updates has a little to do with that. I proceeded to run a Windows Update. However, IE would enter its "not responding" state as soon as I tried to download the ActiveX control. I booted up into Safe Mode, and tried again. This time, the ActiveX control installed, but Windows Update then gave me the 8007043C error, indicating that Windows Update can't run in Safe Mode. I booted back into normal mode, and Windows Update then worked.</li>
<li>Windows Update will barf when it tries to install IE8 again, causing all subsequent steps to fail. You'll need to choose Advanced and unselect the IE8 install to get the rest of the updates installed. Later on, you'll be able to tell Windows Update to ignore the IE8 install.</li>
</ol>Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06455752000373769998noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8362354934396614803.post-8877164785884154692010-12-01T22:04:00.000-08:002010-12-01T22:04:18.181-08:0064-bit conversion...nearly perfectBeing a late-adopter generally means things work, or that someone has figured it out already. I picked the right week to try getting my Sony Net MD running with a Win 7 64-bit box. Sony discontinued their software for this 2 years ago, and the latest version will not work. Until last week, nobody has gotten it working, and I suppose lack of demand for this 10 yr old technology didn't help.<br />
<br />
Link for the google crawler to bump the thread:<br />
<a href="http://forums.sonyinsider.com/index.php?/topic/26009-netmd-for-windows-7-64bit/">http://forums.sonyinsider.com/index.php?/topic/26009-netmd-for-windows-7-64bit/</a>Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06455752000373769998noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8362354934396614803.post-28969860866627137692010-09-15T22:37:00.000-07:002010-09-15T22:37:57.555-07:00Computer VirusesMy main motivation for starting this blog was because I was exceptionally annoyed at a virus that had infiltrated my machine. I've never spent this much time in trying to fix a single problem--more than 15 hours of my time...and my computer's been on for about two weeks straight running virus scans. I can only imagine what kind of bill you'd get from Geek Squad for this kind of service.<br />
<br />
I've never succumbed to a virus so badly that there was data loss...but this time it came close.<br />
<div><br />
<div>Symantec anitivirus...its the only antivirus protection I have on my home PC. About half the time, I have it turned off as it really thrashes the hard drive.<br />
<div><br />
</div><div>I use Outlook to aggregate my mail. I love not having to log in to three different websites to see my new messages.</div><br />
<div>I hate how Outlook automatically runs scripts within email. Especially now that it's helpfully deployed a few different trojans on my machine. It started with popup windows appearing all over the place a week ago.</div><br />
SuperAntiSpyware nor MalwareBytes were able to detect anything wrong. And I didn't want to bother the good folks who inspect <a href="http://free.antivirus.com/hijackthis/">HiJackThis </a>logs.<br />
<br />
<div>Enter <a href="http://www.ubcd4win.com/">UBCD4Win</a>. I've used this several times over the last few years to get me out of windows-cannot-boot jams. And now, I use it to boot into a clean environment, start up MalwareBytes Anti-Malware, update the definitions, and scan the drive. It fixes a few things, but upon booting back up, Windows is still atrociously slow.</div><br />
<div>Back into UBCD4Win...now, I use a McAfee cleaner (Stinger?) which finds a few viruses, and removes them.<br />
<br />
Back to Windows, which boots, shows the "Loading user profile" momentarily, before showing the "saving user profile" message (essentially a login and logout). Uh-oh, looks like the overzealous virus cleaner wiped out a few files (or didn't fix the registry redirects put in place by the virus)<br />
<br />
Thought I'd try the in-place upgrade of Windows XP with a WinXPSP3 CD I made using <a href="http://www.nliteos.com/">nLite</a> a few years back. The CD didn't give me an option to repair, so it started installing instead. Scared that it had actually reformatted the drive without me knowing (the default nLite settings will do this), I cancelled out. Fortunately, it only created a new Windows.0 directory instead of reformatting. Phew.<br />
<br />
Back to UBCD4Win, so that I can use a web browser to find out this log in/log out behaviour is because of an invalid entry in the registry for winlogon.exe . Not being able to find the registry editor in UBCD4Win, I took a chance that wininit.exe was not working, and copied it from D's XP Home installation.</div><br />
<div>Yay, now I can log in. However, most of my apps would crash, including IE6 (on startup), Chrome (after a few minutes), and Firefox (which seemed to be hijacked still, based on the google search results redirections). The system is basically at a SP3 level, so I'm missing quite a few critical security updates, and also experience told me that running all the updates usually fixed up some key system files in the process and got the apps to work again. Not wanting to get hit with another virus, my first priority was to get Windows Updates to pull in all updates. However, IE6 would crash upon starting (and hence Windows Update disabled). Alternative browsers weren't an option either as Windows Updates won't work with them. I downloaded IE8. Incidentally, that step also fixed the problem where Services.msc wouldn't show anything in the Extended tab.</div><br />
<div>Windows update still not working, due to a more common issue with <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Background_Intelligent_Transfer_Service">BITS </a>not started, but going to the Dependencies tab yielded "Interface: class not registered" error. <br />
<br />
Initial google searches directed me towards the little-known "sfc /runnow" command, which attempts to restore ones files back to their original condition. Problem was that it asked me for the WinXP CD, and it would neither accept the original CD nor the nLite SP3 CD. A more manual approach was needed.<br />
<br />
Later on, I found this was the answer:<br />
<br />
rundll32 wbemupgd, UpgradeRepository<br />
as described here:<br />
http://windowsxp.mvps.org/repairwmi.htm</div><br />
<div>BITS still wouldn't start due to error 0x80070BC2. I needed to re-register a few files:</div><div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><a href="http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=87323">http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=87323</a></div></div><div></div><a href="http://www.updatexp.com/0x8007043b.html">http://www.updatexp.com/0x8007043b.html</a><br />
<div><br />
<div><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><a href="http://www.windowsbbs.com/windows-xp/print-34624-xp-wont-update-0x8007043b.html">http://www.windowsbbs.com/windows-xp/print-34624-xp-wont-update-0x8007043b.html</a></div></div><div></div></div><br />
<div><a href="http://support.microsoft.com/kb/910337">http://support.microsoft.com/kb/910337</a></div><br />
<div></div></div><div>That enabled BITS to start.</div><div><br />
</div><div>but when starting Automatic UPdates Service, got this:</div><div><div>---------------------------</div><div>Services</div><div>---------------------------</div><div>Could not start the Automatic Updates service on Local Computer.</div><div>Error 1083: The executable program that this service is configured to run in does not implement the service.</div><div><br />
</div></div><div>I reregistered some more files, and was finally able to get all the Windows Updates to run, and got the computer running smoothly for the first time in a week.<br />
<br />
Still suspicious that there was a virus somewhere (Google results were still redirecting), I did a complete scan with Symantec Antivirus, which picked up a few. I also ran <a href="http://onecare.live.com/site/en-us/default.htm">Windows Onecare Safety Scanner</a>, which I've good experience with in cleaning out stuff Symantec couldn't find. While the quick-scan was clean, the complete scan would show 6 items found. Unfortunately, the complete scan would never finish, and I'd never be able to clean out those files--it would loop inside the c:\windows\installer for nearly a day (before I cancelled the scan).<br />
<br />
I updated MalwareBytes and SuperAntiSpyware once again, and ran a quickscan on each. MalwareBytes picked up the virus, while SuperAntiSpyware missed it. After deleting the virus, and rebooting, I did one final scan (just yesterday) and can now confidently say (after about 2 weeks of dealing with this) that I'm finally clean. There are still a few lingering issues on the system, most likely to do with certain DLLs needing to be reregistered, but for the most part, the system is back to normal.</div></div>Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06455752000373769998noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8362354934396614803.post-30184314452805549232010-09-12T00:31:00.000-07:002010-09-12T00:33:16.309-07:00Acceptable camera quality...for the masses<div style="margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_qnJ9vfGeMr4/TIyAhWHX4xI/AAAAAAAAFMA/5NwM0g6O_tw/s1600/IMAG0123.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_qnJ9vfGeMr4/TIyAhWHX4xI/AAAAAAAAFMA/5NwM0g6O_tw/s400/IMAG0123.jpg" /></a> </div><br />
<div style="margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_qnJ9vfGeMr4/TIyAhr51ANI/AAAAAAAAFMI/FCZl3YwbPCw/s1600/P1020323.JPG"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_qnJ9vfGeMr4/TIyAhr51ANI/AAAAAAAAFMI/FCZl3YwbPCw/s400/P1020323.JPG" /></a> </div><br />
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HTC Cameraphone (default settings) (handheld) vs high-end Panasonic Lumix point & shoot (sunset mode) (handheld, with image stabilization) vs Canon dslr (+1 on saturation) (on tripod).<br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_qnJ9vfGeMr4/TIyBfETX9_I/AAAAAAAAFMY/YperTunyJe4/s1600/IMAG0123.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_qnJ9vfGeMr4/TIyBfETX9_I/AAAAAAAAFMY/YperTunyJe4/s400/IMAG0123.jpg" /></a><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_qnJ9vfGeMr4/TIyBfRCW3kI/AAAAAAAAFMg/IzpqMGbbzag/s1600/P1020323.JPG"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_qnJ9vfGeMr4/TIyBfRCW3kI/AAAAAAAAFMg/IzpqMGbbzag/s400/P1020323.JPG" /></a><br />
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</div><div style="margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center;"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_qnJ9vfGeMr4/TIyBfs3dziI/AAAAAAAAFMo/YVLJFlu7ChA/s1600/IMG_6622.JPG"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_qnJ9vfGeMr4/TIyBfs3dziI/AAAAAAAAFMo/YVLJFlu7ChA/s400/IMG_6622.JPG" /></a></div></div><div style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><a href="http://picasa.google.com/blogger/" target="ext"><img align="middle" alt="Posted by Picasa" border="0" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/pbp.gif" style="background-attachment: scroll; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: none; background-origin: initial; background-position: 0% 50%; background-repeat: repeat repeat; border-bottom-style: none; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-style: none; border-right-width: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-top-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;" /></a></div></div></div>Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06455752000373769998noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8362354934396614803.post-13794530368062786922010-09-11T10:50:00.000-07:002010-09-11T10:54:08.379-07:00MS Security Essentials not passing WGAThe free antivirus tool from MS started complaining about this copy of Windows XP home not being geniune, despite the standalone tool from MS's website stating the contrary. Eventually, the antivirus's 30-day free period expired, and her computer got infected. I spent about an hour in total researching how to fix it and trying various solutions and finally found this:<br /><br /><a href="http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/msestart/thread/3f877be5-3a04-47b7-a3ee-835910633110">http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/msestart/thread/3f877be5-3a04-47b7-a3ee-835910633110</a><br /><br />Renaming data.dat fixed it for me.Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06455752000373769998noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8362354934396614803.post-87341711656413978062010-09-10T01:17:00.000-07:002010-09-10T01:28:44.900-07:00captain's logTechnology is bliss...when it works. When it doesn't, hours are wasted googling error messages and filenames. Its now a necessary evil in our lives. As someone who works in tech, and has grown up with it, I am amazed how much of our electronics will not work out of the box. Skimpy manuals devote pages to warning you not to immerse their parts in water, but will barely tell you anything beyond how to turn it on. And good luck if it doesn't work. The troubleshooting portion of the guide is as useful as a brick in a glass house. "Item will not turn on: Resolution: make sure it is plugged in".<div>As I spend a great deal of time troubleshooting all sorts of things, I figured I should document it, so that maybe it might help someone else googling for the answers.</div>Timhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06455752000373769998noreply@blogger.com0